As our international readers will know, the European summer was caricatured by certain news outlets as a pre-apocalyptic hellscape with soaring temperatures and wildfires raging out of control. Certainly, there was some truth in this; on the Continent, the thermometers definitely got a run for their money, and friends of mine were stranded on Sicily for a few days while Catania airport was brought back into service.
The one place where the narrative didn’t hold, naturally, was in the United Kingdom. For complicated reasons best known to the meteorologists, the heat on the other side of the English Channel meant that we got all the moisture. And so it rained, rained again, and then rained some more.
“It’s good for the garden,” the city-dwellers cried. It certainly was, and it saved me worrying about the herbs in their planters on the terrace. Last year they all died.
Spare a thought for the farmers, though, for whom rain can be both a blessing and a curse. One fine evening on the top of Bredon Hill – on the Gloucestershire-Worcestershire border, which I know our American readers will love pronouncing – all one could hear were farm vehicles. Tractors and combine harvesters replaced the usual birdsong, rushing to get the harvest in while the good weather lasted. By the next morning it was pouring with rain again.
There is a visceral connection between the land and the sky, of course, as our forebears knew very well indeed. They looked to the poetry of Genesis to try to understand more about how the ordering of creation related to their lives. They recognised the distinction between the earth and the firmament, and knew that life-giving rain came from above and watered the ground below, which, well-husbanded, produced crops for their food.
“God is in his heaven, and all is well with the world,” they nodded sagely to each other, as they scythed and threshed and ricked. When all was done, they filled their barns, as in the Proverbs and the Psalms, and then gave themselves over to praise and a party. The custom lingers yet; in rural communities, the harvest festival seems still to be widely well-attended. “Come, ye thankful people, come,” the old hymn has it, with a nod to the parable of the wheat and the chaff, and the reaping of souls at the end of time.
In the far-off past, some communities had more cause to be thankful than others, for a good harvest meant fodder for man and beast alike. From the 13th century, it was a pressing concern as parts of the countryside grew rich off the back of sheep, with English wool proving irresistible to clothmakers in Flanders and further afield. It became the export of exports, and brought widespread prosperity; it was to free up the vital wool-trade routes that the Battle of Crécy was fought (and won) against the French in 1346.
Many of those newly-prosperous communities gave thanks to God with church-building. “Wool churches”, with their soaring naves and towers, represented a new-found local pride as well as a not-always-secondary consideration of the ultimate source of their good fortune. Not all are vast, and very few remain complete after the historical depredations of succeeding years. One stands out above all others, at least to my mind: Fairford, in Gloucestershire.
Compared to many others, the church at Fairford is on the small side. Consecrated in 1497, it looks like a lofty cathedral or abbey has been shrunk to fit into a little English village, such is the quality of its construction and ornamentation. What is particularly special about Fairford is that against all the odds it has managed to preserve most of its pre-Reformation stained glass. To walk into St Mary’s, Fairford – now in Anglican hands, obviously – is to know at least something of what it must have been like to walk into a church on the eve of the English Reformation.
Stories of good and evil abound; of death and judgement; of salvation and damnation; of angels and demons; of heaven and hell. Their surviving colour casts kaleidoscopic rays across the walls and floor as the sun moves round the building. In the Lady Chapel are the best of all: scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, starting with the meeting of Ss Joachim and Anne outside the Golden Gate of Jerusalem, with its evocation of the Immaculate Conception, and moving quickly on to this month’s feast of her Nativity.
O gloriosa femina! The rest of the story follows lancet by lancet, culminating with the Assumption high above the altar. There she stands on the moon, clothed with the sun, and with yet more angels holding a celestial crown over her holy head.
The liturgical round of Our Lady’s feasts, from her birth to the culmination of her earthly life, was part of the rhythm that measured the work and rest of those medieval labourers in the fields. No doubt they blessed her as they came in from the heat of the summer sun to keep what they simply knew as “Our Lady in Harvest”.
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